House. Tree. Person.

by Catriona McPherson

  The shift change was finished. From the landing window as we made our way downstairs, I saw Yvonne and Marion tramp wearily over the gravel to Marion’s car and watched Yvonne unbutton the waistband of her uniform trousers before she dropped into the passenger seat. The door to the acute side opened and closed with a beep from the keypad and a soft swish of its pneumatic hinge. Then silence.

  “This place,” I said to Julia, “isn’t at all how I thought it would be.”

  “It’s exactly how I thought it would be,” she said. “It’s a joke and I knew it was a joke. I just don’t know why.”

  “Why what?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know that either,” she said. “Do you?”

  “Me?” I turned and searched her face. The strong morning light was streaming in the high window at our side. “Why would I know anything?”

  “Well, what are you doing here?” said Julia. “I had to say I’d killed a squirrel to freak my mother out enough to put me in. How did you talk your way past the bouncer?”

  “I answered a job advert,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re on about.”

  “Christ, you’re gullible,” said Julia. “You really think they’re paying you to scoof about with me and squeeze Ryan’s blackheads all day?”

  “What else?” I said.

  “Exactly,” said Julia. “What else?”

  Even as late as that, though, I couldn’t take the final step to admitting it was real and so I deflected her. “You didn’t kill the squirrel?”

  Julia took my arm and started barreling me down the half flight to the ground floor, cackling. “It was roadkill. I just bashed it about a bit more, then I stuck it through with some of my granny’s earrings and hid it in a shoebox under my bed till the smell brought my dear mama. And then the smell of piss in the bed hit her when she kneeled down to drag the shoebox out. And when she went into the en suite to puke, she saw my little bonfire in the bath.”

  “Nicely done,” I said. “And with an eye on safety, doing it in the bath like that. What did you burn?”

  “Family photographs,” Julia said. “My birth certificate, my passport, that sort of thing.”

  “Photographs?” I couldn’t help the note in my voice. That was a meanness I hadn’t expected.

  “It’s all shit anyway,” she said. “So much bullshit in my mother’s version of our saintly family. And anyway, I made copies. Why do you think I’ve got snaps of my various stepfathers all over my phone? I made copies first and the rest of it you can get new ones, can’t you?”

  We had arrived at Sylvie’s room and I shushed her before we entered—thankfully, as it turned out, because Sylvie was deeply asleep. Someone had been in and taken one of the pillows out from behind her head and she was lying flatter and snoring gently.

  “Another action-packed morning coming up,” said Julia, but she said it softly.

  “Come and sit in the armchair,” I said, beckoning her. “Let me do a scalp massage and you can talk to me. How about that, eh?”

  I really hadn’t done too bad a job with her hair considering what I had had to work with. I lifted it, half dried, and let it run through my fingers, thinking no one would know it was a fix-it number unless you told them.

  “So you didn’t kill your father?” I said, once I had settled into rubbing small circles over her scalp with the tips of my fingers. I watched her shoulders drop and heard her breathing slow.

  “Honestly?” she said. “I don’t know. My mum says he left, but I know he died. What I don’t know is why she would lie about it.”

  I nodded even though she couldn’t see me. Why would she lie about it? When I bumped into Julia’s mother in Tesco, the redoubtable Mona Swain, she had said “late lamented” and told me he’d left her his whole estate in his will. Why would she lie to a stranger she’d never meet again?

  Then suddenly I wondered if there was a simple explanation after all.

  “Which one of them are you talking about, though?” I said. “Show me the pictures again.”

  Julia fished out her phone and started scrolling. “I sprang from his loins,” she said showing me the red-eyed, snaggle-toothed man holding the horse’s nose. “Ralph. But he left when I was tiny. He got a fancy woman and started spiffing himself up for her. He’d already begun when this was taken, actually. He’d scrapped his coke-bottle specs and was trying contacts but they made him look like even more of a drunk than he really was, so he gave them up. But that was what alerted my mother to the fact of him getting ready to dump her. Going to the optician and all the rest of it. Suddenly taking more baths and clipping his horny toenails.” She shuddered. “So you can imagine what she thought of Garran’s gym membership and tooth-polishing regime.” She flicked the screen until the tanned man in the pink cashmere appeared. “Poor mother. They keep deciding that all her money isn’t worth waking up to her face on the pillow beside them every day. Well, maybe she’s wise to settle for this grunter. Good old Perry Uving.” Another swipe and the red-faced man in front of the wall of glass was laughing out at us around his cigar again. “Can you actually think of a more bogus P G Wodehouse name than Peregrine Uving? I think he must have made it up. I bet he was Keith McGurk before.”

  “But it really is her money?” I said. “Is she an heiress or something?”

  “Uhhh,” said Julia. “Jesus, I don’t know. It’s se-ew terribly vulg-ah to talk about money.”

  “Humour me,” I said. “I’m the vulgar sort, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Well, I know the land was my dad’s,” Julia said. “My real dad, I mean. Ralph. This was all his family estate before the army got their finger in the pie. So I suppose she just got it in the divorce—the new place and what’s left in the way of policies and all that. I’ve never thought about it.”

  It was a different world. She was probably speaking no more than the truth; she really hadn’t ever questioned the fact that she lived in a posh house on a huge chunk of land that used to be even huger before they sold it off for a hospital and army training. I raked my fingers back from her forehead to the nape of her neck—once, twice, three times—and felt the last bit of tension leave her. The phone dropped into her lap and went to stand-by.

  “Julia?” I said, very softly. “Do you remember saying to me that you hurt your daddy’s middle?”

  “No,” she said. She sounded drowsy. “His middle? What does that mean? His stomach?”

  “I don’t know. You said it one night when you were almost asleep.”

  “No, that’s not right. I heard it one night when I was almost asleep. I didn’t say it.”

  Maybe that was how it seemed to her, if she was groggy. Maybe the words didn’t feel as if they’d come from her. I had never taken the drugs Dr. Ferris had her on and I couldn’t say what they might do to perception.

  “Which daddy was it, though?” I said. “Ralph or Garran or Perry?”

  “Ralph,” she said, without a moment’s hesitation. Then she jerked upright in the chair and turned to face me. “Are you fucking hypnotising me? I didn’t say you could hypnotise me!”

  “I’m not,” I said. I put out a hand towards her shoulder, but she made a fist and knocked my arm away, hard enough to bruise me.

  “I am not doing some bullshit regression to a past life,” she said. “It’s bad enough pretending to be a nutter. I’ve got no intention of going off my rocker for real.”

  “I’ve no idea why you’re so upset,” I told her. “I’m not trying to regress you to anything.” I flashed on Angel telling me he remembered seeing me in the hospital. “You said it yourself, you were a toddler when your dad left. You were old enough to remember.”

  And of course, we had woken Sylvie. She didn’t sit up but she turned her head and blinked slowly. “Ju,” she whispered. “Ju.”

  Julia shot to her feet and screamed, a long whistling scre
am of pure terror. Sylvie bent her head and drew her knees up, curling herself into a tiny ball under her covers.

  “You!” Julia said, sticking a finger into my face close enough to make me draw back. “Leave me alone. Don’t you dare mess with me anymore or I’ll fucking kill you. I’ll stick a knife in your belly and fucking kill you.” She slammed out of the room, taking a swipe at a little side table as she went and sending it flying, scattering a bowl of potpourri and smashing a glass lamp-base into tiny shards on the pale carpet.

  I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t go to comfort Sylvie, or follow Julia to stop her harming herself or anyone else who might get in her way. I was turned to stone. I was still just standing there when Lars put his head round the door, his eyes like saucers, and found me.

  “What the fudge, Ali?” he said. He hurried over to Sylvie’s bed and laid a hand on the highest point of the quivering mound under the covers. “Ssh-ssh,” he said. Then he looked back over at me. “Seriously, what happened?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “I can’t explain it.” But at last the spell that had locked my knees and glued my feet to the floor was fading and I went over and folded the covers back from Sylvie’s head, stroked her hair back and kissed her brow.

  She took a deep breath in, her bottom lip wuthering twice against her teeth as she sucked the air, then she shifted onto her back pushing her legs down the bed and turned to look at Lars. She smiled at him.

  Lars’s eyes fell wide and his mouth dropped open. “Hel-lo!” he said. He glanced up at me and then back at Sylvie, a grin spreading over his face. “Sylvie, I’m Lars. We’ve not exactly met.”

  “La-la,” Sylvie breathed, touching the tip of her tongue very precisely to her teeth. She rolled her head on the pillow until her eyes met mine. “La-li,” she said, with the same two careful flicks of movement.

  “Well, well, well,” said Lars. “We need to get the doc in here to see this.”

  “No,” I blurted.

  Lars frowned and turned his head to one side, keeping his eyes on me, as if he could see me clearer from the corner of his eye or as if he was maybe listening to something only he could hear. “What’s going on?” he said.

  “I have no clue,” I told him. “Yet. So let’s just keep this to ourselves until I get one.”

  I’m not sure if he would ever have agreed to it if it was only me, but he couldn’t argue with both of us and Sylvie was right behind me. She rolled her head again, fixed Lars with the clearest look I had ever seen on her face, and said, “Sshhhh.”

  Twenty

  “Can I ask you something?” I said to Lars when we were out of Sylvie’s room. He glanced at his watch but nodded. “How easy would it be for a patient to fool you?”

  “Make out they’re better and get out?” he said. “It happens. If someone’s sectioned in but they’re determined, they can give us all the right answers and get home again.”

  “I meant the other way actually,” I said. “Malingering, I suppose you’d say.”

  “Even easier,” he said. “Doesn’t happen so much here, where somebody’s got to pay a bill. But it’s part of the game in the NHS. In for five weeks and six days, touch and go, then miraculously better on day seven when the benefits dry up. You get used to it.”

  “But you’d know what they’re at,” I said. “What I’m asking is, can people really make you believe they’re seriously ill if they’re not? If they’re just maybe hiding out here. Or they’ve got some reason they want to be here?”

  “Are we talking about Sylvie?” Lars said. “No. No one could keep that up for fifteen years.”

  “Not Sylvie,” I said. “Julia.”

  Lars considered it before he answered. Then he shook his head. “Naw. She’s a troubled wee soul. The diagnosis might change depending on where she is in her mood cycle, but no, there’s no chance she’s having us on. Why would she?” He glanced at his watch again and started walking, speaking over his shoulder. “Sorry, Ali. I’ve got to run. Catch you later, eh?”

  I walked out the front door and across the grass to the gazebo. I should be working. I should be wrapping Posy in seaweed or threading Jo’s eyebrows up into cheerful arches, see if I could lift her depression face-first.

  And I would. If I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong in twenty minutes sitting thinking, I would let it go for good. I was practised at that, after all.

  But first I’d let it rip. What were my worst fears whispering to me? I was here as a stooge. I was going to be planted here one nightshift to take the blame for something, my faked credentials and my medical history all doing their bit to bring me down. As I tramped over the wet grass, my work shoes squeaking and squelching, I tried to throw my mind back over everything that had happened, every word and look, to see if there were any clues about what that something might be.

  Julia. What else, if not Julia? The job advert went out not long after she arrived here. And we’d been thrown together from my first day. And Lars hadn’t answered the question I’d asked him. I wanted to know how someone could fool the staff and he’d come back with why would they.

  But if Julia was in here on the trail of something she knew—that same something that I almost knew if I half shut my eyes and half turned away—then the why was answered and only the how remained.

  I had reached the gazebo. Its inside was littered with cigarette ends and it stank of pee in a way it hadn’t the day before. Had one of the boys, caught short, saved himself a trip? Had Julia squatted here, too lazy to go back to the house? I turned and looked back. The French windows in Dr. Ferris’s office overlooked this bit of the garden, but her desk faced the other way. In fact, I could see the back of her head as she sat there now. She’d have to stand up and walk to the glass to see me.

  Still, and despite the reek, I went inside and sat down right at the back, in the shadows, on the wooden bench that lined the wall.

  Dr. Ferris employed me. If there was something rotten going on at Howell Hall, some corruption or abuse of power, fiddling the council or bilking the parents, she knew about it. Her own husband said she was the businesswoman and all he wanted to do was help patients get well.

  Dr. Ferris wouldn’t wonder why Julia had got herself committed, not if she was hiding something. And so Dr. Ferris might be able to see through the act: the shouting and swearing, the shopping, the tantrums, even the chopping off of all that frizzy hair. Maybe she met Mrs. Swain in Tesco that night to try to persuade her to take Julia away. Did that make any sense? I asked myself. Honestly? I didn’t think so. Why wouldn’t Dr. Ferris just call Mrs. Swain, or email her, or even ask both the parents to come in for a meeting?

  I tried to think it through. Maybe Dr. F wouldn’t let Mrs. Swain come to the Hall so soon after Julia’s admittance, in case seeing her mother got in the way of her official treatment plan. I knew that was the sort of thing places like this went in for. Like a cult. Certainly, if Dr. F believed Julia was really ill, he wouldn’t approve of his wife trying to get Mrs. Swain to take the girl home.

  But if Julia really was here to spy on the Ferrises and Dr. Ferris knew that, she’d have to find a way to deal with the girl. Finally, I saw a glimmer of a reason for me being employed here. Dr. Ferris was going to accuse Julia of doing something so dreadful that the Hall couldn’t keep her. Something dreadful that needed a patsy—although I didn’t understand why the patsy couldn’t be Belle or Surraya or one of the others.

  Until suddenly I could. They were valuable members of the team. The hospital couldn’t function without its nurses. I was expendable. If something happened when a beauty therapist was taking a turn of the nightshift, and it came out after that she’d lied her way into the job, everyone would blame her—blame me!—and once the hospital had got rid of both the framed patient and the disgraced staff member, Howell Hall would carry on the same as ever.

  If this was real, I needed to warn Mr
s. Swain that Julia was in trouble, maybe even in danger, try to persuade her to get the girl away.

  If it was real. And how could I warn her when I didn’t know what the trouble or the danger actually was? What was the rottenness at the heart of Howell Hall? What was the secret Julia had got herself in here to ferret out?

  I went as far inside my head as I could get and found … nothing. I had to let this go.

  So. A bench. Except the park I sat in when I was pregnant with her was Angel’s park. The swings had plastic beads set into the safety rails that he used to spin round endlessly with one cold little pink finger, his mitten pulled off and held in his other hand like a posy. He didn’t want me to push him. More than that, he would wail and wave me away if I tried to push him, the movement spoiling his concentration on the fascinating little beads as he spun them and spun them. Once or twice, I even felt a shift of unease in me. This was how autism started: obsessively repeated behaviours, unnatural focus and a pulling away from others. But he was always happy enough to come away when I said it was teatime, taking my hand and chatting to me about how much he loved sausages and where Daddy was and why trees stopped holding on to leaves.

  If not Angel’s park, how about the hospital? People sometimes donated couches to the ante-natal clinic waiting room, or the neonatal unit family room, but no one wanted a memorial to a baby in there. I wouldn’t have wanted to sit on a dead baby’s couch when it was my time.

  Anyway, first we’d have to have a name to put on the brass plaque of the bench or embroider onto scatter cushions for the couch. I lifted my head and looked through the fretted wood lintel above the gazebo door at the grey sky and the bare branches. Skye. Leaf. Pearl. Dawn. I began to understand what Dr. Ferris had said about Angel. But I kept thinking Sylvie. It was perfect for her. She was a sylph, only ever seen as a silvery fish on the early scans before she slipped away. Sylvie, over there in her room, with her unmoving bookmark in her Maya Angelou, was another one. Silvery and slipping away. I wondered if Julia called her Sissy just to be mean, or to pay Sylvie back for calling her Ju-ju. But then she was used to Ju-ju. That was what her mother called her too.